NDPR has a review of my Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds by Eric Hiddleston. I think it's quite a helpful review--the concerns about my account are powerful and interesting.
This post is a very rough bunch of responses to Hiddleston, and will not be comprehensible without reading his review.
I am inclined to endorse some version of the "externalist" way out that Hiddleston gives. I think this will damage at least one of my arguments against Platonism, the one that says that opponents of Platonism are "horribly confused" if Platonism is true. But Hiddleston is right that that's a bad argument.
I think Hiddleston doesn't give enough credit to my dogs argument against Platonism. There, I am imagining that the Platonist heaven is augmented with the necessity of there being no dogs, but all earthly stuff is unchanged. I claim in the book that nonetheless dogs would remain possible. My line of thought behind that was that dogs would remain possible, because they would remain actual, and the actual is possible, no matter what the Platonist heaven says. I think Hiddleston's Little-P = Big-P position doesn't help here.
(It occurs to me, by the way, that the Platonist could have a theory that escapes my dogs argument as it stands in the book. Here's the theory. The primitive property is mere possibility. Possibility is then defined in terms of mere possibility: a proposition is possible provided that it is either true or merely possible. But I think this version still has a problem. The original Platonic version has the puzzle of why it is that actuality implies possibility. This version doesn't have that problem. Instead it has the problem of why it is that that mere possibility implies non-actuality.)
Hiddleston also worries a lot about Euthyphro-type questions, like:
- (E1) Why should God be incapable of bringing about really impossible propositions, such as contradictory ones?
- (E2) Why should God be capable of bringing about really possible propositions?
- If, per impossibile, God or any other agent were capable of bringing about a contradictory proposition, that proposition would be possible.
- If, per impossibile, God were to command a horrendous deed, that horrendous deed would be obligatory.
I do think Hiddleston's question about what explains why God can do contradictory things is a good and difficult question, but I don't think they're quite species of the Euthyphro problem. I think I can say that there just does not exist any being with the power to bring about contradictory propositions. This is in need of no more grounding than the fact that there are no unicorns--it's just a negative existential. Is it in need of an explanation? My official line on the PSR restricts it to contingent truths. But maybe there still is an explanation of it in terms of some deep facts about the divine nature (maybe its beauty, say). Maybe Hiddleston's best bet here would be to push me in a way that Josh Rasmussen has done: I can't explain why God can't create square circles, just as the Platonist can't explain why everything that's actual is also possible, and so I don't have an advantage over the Platonist here. I don't know exactly what to say here, but I think one difference is with regard to per impossibile counterfactuals.
- If dogs existed but the Platonic heaven didn't say that they were possible, dogs would still be possible.
- If God were capable of creating a square circle, square circles would be possible.
As for (E2), I don't feel the force of that. First of all, the primary view doesn't mention God: it's quantified over all agents. So the modified question is:
- (E2b) Why should every really possible proposition be such that there is an agent who can bring it about (or, more precisely, bring about a chain of causes leading to it)?
5 comments:
I worry that there is an objection to your account which is exactly analogous to your "dog" objection to Platonism. (Though, caveat: I may just be unaware of features of your view which would block this objection) Suppose, per impossibile, that all the agents with the ability to make it true that there are stars (I suspect that this would only include God) suddenly lost that ability, but all worldly facts remain the same. In particular, it remains true that there are stars, even though no agent has the ability to make this true. Intuitively, stars would remain possible, simply because they would remain actual. I don't think you can object to this on the grounds that I'm asking you to suppose something impossible, for the Platonist will also claim that it would be impossible for Platonic heaven to be augmented with the necessity of there being no dogs.
That's OK, because the official account is disjunctive: p is possible iff p is true or something can initiate a chain of causes leading to its being the case that p.
Isn't it obvious that the reason why God can't do contradictory things is because God is Logic itself? Since it's common sense to ground possibilities in actualities, logical possibilities are grounded in a logical actuality, and that actuality must also be necessary and it must also ground the laws of logic, and the laws of logic must also "flow" from it so to speak.
Take for example a brute fact of a brick popping into existence in front of your right now. Right now, it is logically possible that a brick could uncausedly and without sufficient reason pop into existence. It is also logically impossible that a square circle should exist. What makes / allows for the possibility of a brute fact while denying the possibility of a square circle? It must be something positive about reality / a positive reality. The laws of logic are such a candidate. But the laws of logic are abstractions, so there must be something concrete behind them.
This higher logical reality would be God, and since he is Logic, logical possibility "flows" from Him. But because God is Logic itself, it is impossible that he actualise a contradictory state of affairs, for the same reason it is impossible for a triangle to be a squre. As for why God should be able to actualise possible propositions, it seems obvious that the answer is found in the very definition of the word possible. It is possible that I can run because I actually can do it. Conversely, it is not possible that I could fly, because I actually cannot do it. Of course, we could reject the principle of proportionate causality and say that a thing could do things it does not have the capacity for. But this would only be on the basis of it being logically possible for it to happen, so we're back to square one.
"Right now, it is logically possible that a brick could uncausedly and without sufficient reason pop into existence." Note that if this is true, then there is no God. For God is essentially the cause of everything other than himself. So if God exists, nothing but God can exist without cause.
I agree with the PSR and PC, but I think that if the argument I mentioned above is valid, then the existence of God can be proven even if uncaused bricks were possible. It all depends on the fact that uncaused bricks as a concept can even be entertained because they are logical possibilities, and the grounding of that very logical possibility of an uncaused brick would have to be, after a bit of analysis, God.
In this sense, you are right that God is the cause of everything because He is the very thing that allows for the logical possibility of anything, including uncaused objects. He would then be the ground of the possibility of uncaused objects and in this sense would be the modal cause of that very possibility.
So it would be true in this sense that everything is dependent on God ontologically. In a similar way, God is that which distinguishes a thing from nothing, and if a brick did pop into existence uncaused, it would only be something occuring without a prior cause, but it would still have an ontological grounding since it is distinguished from nothing by another, and not by itself since it is not necessary. It would in this sense be caused as well because it ontologically depends on God for it's being.
Post a Comment